Alex Brown Reviews Forged by Blood by Ehigbor Okosun

Forged by Blood, Ehigbor Okosun (Harper Voyager 978-0-0631-1262-9, $32.00. 400pp, hc) August 2023.

Readers looking for a high-octane story with an equal amount of romance and fight scenes should look no further than Ehigbor Okosun’s Forged by Blood, the first in the debut author’s Tainted Blood duology. It’s the perfect summer adventure story.

Forged by Blood begins when Dèmi is a child living in desperate poverty with her mother. Her father is long gone, which Dèmi is fine with because she believes he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Oluso, or Black people with magical abilities. A long time ago, everyone had access to magic. Now few have, and it is seen more of a curse than a blessing. After the North invaded and conquered the South, the newly crowned King Sorenson enslaved and slaughtered Oluso, and ‘‘half-breeds’’ were cast out. As Oluso, Dèmi and her mother earn a meager living treating medical ailments of the Ajes, those without magic. But it all comes apart when an Aje, Jonas, and his nosy nanny betray them and get her mother killed.

A decade later, Dèmi is offered the chance to get revenge. She’s spent the last few years living with a mixed race Oluso couple and training with her best friend, a teleporting Oluso called Colin. Lord Ekwensi believes he can protect the Oluso if he’s in a position of power, but to get that power he needs Dèmi to put him there. Ekwensi hires her and Colin to kidnap the prince then deliver him to his estate so he can pretend to rescue the boy and gain favor. It’s a shaky plot, but Dèmi can only see the benefits. Nothing and no one is what they seem, not even the handsome prince she can’t stop feeling drawn to. Forest spirits, power­ful monarchs, and stubborn friends pull Dèmi in every direction, but not all of them have her best interests at heart.

Now, I love a chaotic, fast-paced plot as much as the next person, but there is such a thing as a too much plot moving too quickly. The last hundred or so pages of Forged by Blood feel like Okosun slammed the accelerator all the way to the floor. Time flies by, so much so that it’s a little hard to keep track of how many days have passed. At one point toward the end, a character mentions Dèmi has only known Jonas a few days and I had thought for sure at least a week or two had passed. This would be manageable, but when paired with the flood of betrayals and dramatic reveals, the whole thing feels overwhelming. As the final con­frontation closes in, every character seems to have fifteen different secrets to reveal to Dèmi, some of which are harmless, but most have to do with her parents. There are so many reveals that I started to lose track of what actually happened. I’m not convinced we needed most of those reveals, or at least that we needed them to all happen at once in the last quarter of the book. It has the effect of turning the ending from a solid resolution with enough loose threads for book two into being nothing but setup for book two.

It’s too bad New Adult never took off in publish­ing, because Forged by Blood is a great example of it. It’s too mature to be young adult – although I’m sure it will get hit with that label because the three main characters all seem to be in their late teens or early twenties – but the plot is also driven by the impulses and emotional whims of someone with a lot of growing to do. New Adult is all about those first few years after becoming an official adult, about building a life and figuring things out. It’s about making mistakes and learning what kind of person you want to be. Those themes are touched on again and again here.

Dèmi fails again and again, often because she hasn’t had enough life experience to know how to strategize a successful plan. She reacts strongly (and often negatively) to older adults giving advice or instructions. When I was a twentysomething, I thought I knew better than all those boring old people telling me what to do; now as a fortysome­thing, I want to beg Dèmi to listen for once. Her interpretations of situations and assumptions about people are frequently wrong, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. On the other hand, the older adults around her learned from their own mistakes to be either overly cautious to the point of doing nothing or brutally revolutionary to the point of not being able to see the damage they leave in their wake. Book one is about Dèmi confronting these two paths, and I hope book two will show her realizing that she doesn’t have to choose between them, that she can forge her own path by taking the best of both.

Ehigbor Okosun saved her best work for character development. Nearly every character in Forged by Blood is fully realized and carries with them a sense of personal history and dreams of the future. In particular, Dèmi, Colin, and Jonas are complex young people still figuring out what they want versus what they need. Even the infuriating Mari and loathsome King Sorenson are well-rounded. Between the rocking plot and impressive character work, this book should be at the top of your to-be-read pile.

This review and more like it in the September 2023 issue of Locus.

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